Five desalination plants shut down for days, while Gaza remains in grip of severe water and sanitation crisis

Israel is facing weeks of water shortages after an exceptional algae bloom crippled much of its desalination capacity, in a crisis scientists say was triggered when Israeli attacks destroyed much of Gaza’s wastewater infrastructure, causing a massive discharge of untreated sewage.

“Pollution does not recognise political borders,” said the Zalul Environmental Association, an Israeli NGO dedicated to protecting the country’s seas and shores. “The discharge of untreated sewage from the Gaza Strip into the sea is contributing to the worsening crisis affecting the Israeli desalination facilities. The wastewater contains nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, which feed microalgae and cyanobacteria and may intensify their blooms.”

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Changes in guidance and science seem to have little impact on millions of devastated lives. It’s a shocking social crisis playing out behind closed doors

I’ve spent my working life covering neglected issues. But few are neglected like the devastating chronic condition ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome). In severe cases, the illness shuts down people’s lives almost entirely, causing an extreme loss of energy and a wide range of physical and cognitive symptoms that can prevent patients from working, socialising and, sometimes, even moving or eating. Yet these people have been more or less airbrushed from our minds.

To find out what this neglect looks like in practice, this week I put out a call on Bluesky asking people with ME/CFS about their recent experiences of treatment. I was immediately inundated with horrifying testimonies. “I’ve just been completely abandoned”; “a 10-year waiting list for treatment”; “we’ve given up seeking medical support”; “stuck in limbo”; “I just felt utterly unheard, invalidated”. I’ve been sent hundreds of shocking and heart-rending accounts.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

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IPPR finds failure to align testing standards has forced companies to abandon exporting to EU and is costing costing 0.18% of national income

The UK is losing out on annual exports to the EU that could be worth as much as £6.5bn without a deal with Brussels that allows manufacturers to jettison duplicate product testing.

In the latest attempt to calculate the loss of trade with the EU after Brexit, the IPPR thinktank said many companies have given up selling goods to the EU or set up subsidiaries inside the trade bloc after successive governments failed to secure a mutual recognition agreement that would avoid the extra administration costs.

Motor vehicle and part exports would have been between £2.48bn and £3.42bn higher each year.

Electronic exports could have been between £1.17bn and £1.67bn higher.

Pharmaceutical exports would have had an estimated annual uplift of between £740m and £820m.

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Furnace Brook in East Sussex was home to carp, tench, bream, roach and trout – and 15 trailer-loads had to be buried. The mystery led to a neighbouring farm, and a story of waste, pollution and dirty rivers that reveals a lot about Britain today

When Alistair and Diane Gould bought Furnace Brook in 2013, they had big plans. It was an idyllic spot: a stream-fed fishing lake nestled in a secluded valley in the High Weald, East Sussex, surrounded by woodland and fields. “People loved to come fishing here because it’s so beautiful,” says Diane. “Some of them had been coming for so many years that they got to know the individual fish.”

Diane moved here from Kent in 2000, when Furnace Brook was owned by a distant relative. Her two younger sons, then 10 and 14, flourished. They would chat to the anglers about the fish they were catching and throwing back in, and sell them bacon sandwiches. Her elder son, Simon, moved from London to join them in 2006 and became a keen angler himself, and then the fishing manager, or bailiff, looking after the fish and the landscape around the lake.

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Die Linke candidate, a lawyer affected by her experiences as the child of political migrants from Turkey, poised to head Berlin coalition government

Elif Eralp launched her election bid last autumn with the blunt statement: “People like me are actually not supposed to become mayor in this country.” So the fact that the 45-year-old lawyer and daughter of political migrants from Turkey is on the verge of becoming Berlin’s next mayor and the capital’s first leader of Turkish origin is quite the moment in German politics.

After last weekend’s city state election, in which her far-left party, Die Linke, came first with more than a quarter of the votes, Eralp has become a household name.

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The new prime minister has declared he wants to end 40 years of neoliberalism. But is he really prepared to be that radical?

In May 2025, when Keir Starmer was still prime minister, Labour politicians, campaigners and journalists gathered at the Ministry of Sound in London to watch a series of panel talks and presentations illuminated by the lucid glow of club lights. The day-long event was organised by a campaign group called Compass, and the subjects included child poverty, the Murdoch-owned media and the rise of the radical right.

“We felt as though the Labour government was failing, and needed to be pulled into the 21st century,” Neal Lawson, the founder of Compass, told me. The Starmer government’s support for the Conservatives’ two-child benefit cap, its equivocating stance on Gaza and its emulation of far-right rhetoric – crystallised in a speech on immigration, during which the prime minister suggested Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers” – were causing Labour supporters to rapidly desert their party. “The Starmer project was so obviously intellectually bankrupt. He was personally so disinterested in ideas and big thinking that I thought, this is never going to fly,” Lawson said.

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A conflict that began with tanks and then artillery is now pivoting around a new generation of drones focused on military, industrial, economic and civilian targets

Finally, in the dead of night, the threat above has passed. The rain has eased and the Ukrainian drones are ready, prepared by a ground crew shrouded in hard-to-detect green and red lights. A small succession of Ukrainian Fire Point FP-2 craft, miniature monoplanes with a 6-metre wingspan and more than 100kg of explosive, line up for an attack mission into occupied Luhansk, over 200 miles away.

The drone’s main piston engine is a familiar scooter’s buzz, but its launch booster is something else. The jet sound reverberates, almost painfully. A burst of fire lurches into the distance, the last of which signifies it is time for Ukraine’s 413 Raid drone regiment to pack and go.

The launch of an FP-2 drone during the mission into occupied Luhansk

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In the last 15 years, she has gone from respected actor to stratospheric, garlanded star. Now she is back on TV as a chic sleuth in a racy car – despite being terrible at guessing whodunnit

It is high summer and, while Lesley Manville may be suffering a bit with hay fever and the heat (“I’m so white, all I do is burn”), she doesn’t do wilting. Soon to head outside to tend to the ailing garden of her London home, she is enjoying a rare period of rest after six almost unbroken months of Oedipus on Broadway and then Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National. She keeps, incidentally, the Tony she won for playing Jocasta in Oedipus on a shelf by the computer, “next to its friend, Larry Olivier” – an Olivier awarded for the same role.

“You don’t go into a job thinking about awards,” she says, before grinning conspiratorially. “Listen, you don’t say to an Olympian, ‘Oh, is it OK that you didn’t win?’ Yes, you like to win!”

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This trip into the celeb couple’s Cheshire mansion is nowhere as real as they’d like you to believe. But their self-deprecation is hard not to enjoy

‘There are two obvious problems here, the first being that the Rooneys’ lives feel like fiction: he was a generational sporting talent, a one-in-a-million player whose success has bought him and Coleen a ridiculous Cheshire mansion with a cinema, indoor pool and adjacent football pitch. To get back to the road you have to drive over a bridge across a lake. As we join them, Coleen is working out how to capitalise on a recent appearance on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, while Wayne is plotting an uptick in his media appearances that he hopes will make him a regular on Match of the Day. Technically, the Rooneys exist on our Earth, but – as they both admit, recalling their working-class childhoods in Croxteth, Liverpool – they have left ordinary life behind.

Even if we accept that they are to some extent real people, the further problem is that if you want to get to know someone, watching a behind-the-scenes “at home with” reality show is not the way to do it. This is an established format that was initially shaped by the Kardashians and has now evolved to fit the specific needs of retired British sportsmen looking to relaunch themselves as media personalities. By design, the shows are anything but realistic, instead offering a carefully calibrated blend of fantastic luxury that viewers can escape into, and domestic rituals – breakfast, the school run – offered up in a half-hearted attempt to show that really, these famous folk are just like us.

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De wiskunde is het eerste wetenschappelijke veld dat midscheeps is geraakt door kunstmatige intelligentie. Maar de essentie van het vak ligt voorbij de kunde van AI.

Hoogleraar plantenecologie Hans de Kroon heeft altijd met een bredere blik naar de natuur gekeken. Tijdens een wandeling bij Nijmegen toont hij zijn „liefde voor het landschap”.

OEGSTGEEST (ANP) - Stichting Massaschade & Consument begint een massaclaim tegen Epic Games, de maker van de populaire game Fortnite. De claimstichting zegt dat de gamestudio jongeren misleidt. Zij krijgen tijdens het gamen bijvoorbeeld aftelklokken te zien, die de indruk wekken dat de mogelijkheid om in de game iets te kopen bijna stopt, maar dagen later staat de aanbieding er nog steeds, zeggen de eisers.

De stichting wil dat Epic Games het geld terugbetaalt dat mensen "onder die druk hebben uitgegeven" voor hun 21e verjaardag. Daarnaast wil de claimorganisatie dat spelers een schadevergoeding krijgen. Dat zou bij elkaar neerkomen op een bedrag van ruim 100 miljoen euro.

Stichting Massaschade & Consument spande eerder zaken aan tegen onder meer Airbnb, TikTok, Google, Sony, Snapchat, ABN AMRO en Klarna. De claim tegen Airbnb werd afgewezen door het gerechtshof, dat oordeelde dat de stichting in Ierland moest zijn, waar het Europese hoofdkantoor van het bedrijf staat. De zaak ligt nu bij de Hoge Raad. De stichting werd niet-ontvankelijk verklaard in de zaak tegen ABN AMRO en stapte daarom naar het gerechtshof.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Minder mensen namen in 2025 afscheid van hun baan doordat zij een nieuwe baan hadden of een eigen bedrijf startten. In plaats daarvan lagen vooral faillissementen, bezuinigingen, reorganisaties of arbeidsconflicten vaker aan de basis van een vertrek bij een werkgever. Dat meldt het Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS).

Vorig jaar waren er per kwartaal zo'n 618.000 werknemers tussen de 15 en 75 jaar die ontslag namen dan wel kregen. In 2022, de vorige keer dat het CBS dit onderzocht, was de werkloosheid laag en waren er per kwartaal zo'n 677.000 ontslagen, gedwongen dan wel uit vrije wil. Werknemers noemden in 2025, net als in 2022, het vinden van een andere baan of het starten van een eigen bedrijf de belangrijkste reden voor ontslag. Dit aandeel nam in drie jaar tijd wel af van zo'n 42 procent naar ruim 38 procent van het totaal.

Volgens CBS-hoofdeconoom Peter Hein van Mulligen kan dit komen door de toegenomen krapte op de arbeidsmarkt. "Met teruglopende vacatures is het niet altijd meer vanzelfsprekend dat mensen ontslag nemen omdat ze een andere baan hebben gevonden", voegt hij toe. Ook stipt Van Mulligen aan dat de arbeidsmarkt vergrijst, waardoor een groter wordend deel van de werkenden minder snel van baan wisselt.

Arbeidsongeschikt

Tegelijkertijd namen gedwongen ontslagen om bedrijfseconomische redenen juist toe, van bijna 5 procent in 2022 tot ruim 8 procent in 2025. Een faillissement was daarbij in relatief weinig gevallen reden voor ontslag, vorig jaar was dat zo'n 2 procent van de totale ontslagredenen. Dit lag hoger bij ontslagen door bezuinigingen, reorganisaties of arbeidsconflicten; vorig jaar ging het om 6 procent van de totale ontslagen.

Mensen kunnen ook om andere redenen afscheid nemen van hun baan. Ongeveer 15 procent van de ontslagenen zag een tijdelijk contract niet verlengd worden. Het starten van een opleiding of studie was voor zo'n 11 procent van de werknemers reden om zelf ontslag te nemen.

Het CBS meldt ook dat iets meer dan de helft van de mensen die om bedrijfseconomische redenen is ontslagen, in het daaropvolgende kwartaal niet meer werkzaam was. Ongeveer vier op de tien mensen uit deze groep ging bijvoorbeeld met pensioen, raakte arbeidsongeschikt of maakte de keuze om niet opnieuw een baan te zoeken. De rest raakte werkloos.

Een automobilist is woensdagavond tegen een geparkeerde auto gebotst op de Pascalweg in Rotterdam-Lombardijen. De bestuurder is meegenomen naar het ziekenhuis. Beide auto's raakten beschadigd.

Vandaag is een vriendelijke najaarsdag met flink wat zon en blijft het droog. De temperatuur stijgt naar ongeveer 19 graden en ligt daarmee iets lager dan gistermiddag. De wind is daarbij matig en komt uit het noordwesten.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: